My Name: Matthew Sanborn Smith. My challenge: Write 1000 stories by the time I'm 50 years old. Current story count: 160. Current age: 48. (Yes, I know it will never happen. I push on regardless.)
The One-Thousand is made up of stories that are aimed at publication in professional venues.
I've been published at Tor.com, Nature, and Chizine, among others. Listen to me on the occasional StarShipSofa and every single Beware the Hairy Mango. Shoot me an e-mail at upwithgravity@gmail.com

Monday, July 09, 2012

I'm as tired
as an old joke tonight. I was up at five a.m. after a slow trickle of sleep, the feed torn
from my arm long before my vein belly was filled. Two hour meeting at the job, then off to celebrate my daughter's seventeenth birthday with movies
and more movies, junk food on top of junk food served between two
cupcake pizzas and 64 oz. Crisco sodas all around. Got a little nap, then unsleepytime misery, trying to crawl
from the grave into the living room and a little fun with The Sims. She had a great day.

Now,
though, still running on the distant memory of fumes, all I want to do is sleep. But I'm Kaizening myself into getting some things done. It's a Japanese philosophy of improvement for corporations, but as Kaizen applies to an individual, it's basically conning your lazy ass into doing something by taking on a ridiculously small piece of it.

"I'm just going to fold one shirt."

"I'm just going to write one sentence."

"I'm just going to walk twenty feet."

And maybe you do just that, which is something you wouldn't have otherwise done or, which is often the case, you do a bit more because you're there anyway. It's good for getting something from yourself when you don't want to give anything.

Friday, July 06, 2012

We humans have the minds to conceive of things which don't exist and figure out what we need to do to bring those things into existence. We have the arms and legs and strong backs to manipulate matter. We have the social instincts to share our ideas; to ask for help; to divide the labor, each to his or her expertise; and bring all of these things together to make the changes we want in the world. We are demigods.